I can think of no better way to encourage closed development processes than to get upset at a "statement by a Mozilla person" and use it as a reason to write off the entire project. You have no idea what Google is saying about your privacy behind closed doors.

With an internal policy that all opt-out proposals requiring the transfer of personalized data must be discussed with the rest of the team (incl. PR) and publicly, the post would have sounded quite differently.

By the way, in less than three hours, there will be an AMA on /r/firefox with the Project Manager of the User Advocacy team at Mozilla:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hos...

Debate, yes, but not 'don't use nightly, sky is falling'.

But, small question: isn't the Nightly an experimental version?

You're right, Nightly users probably are more savvy so there's no need to decide for them. Lay out what the user's options are and force them to make a choice when the browser starts, don't have a default, and don't have an option preselected.

All this crap has to do with what's okay to do in the absence of clear user intent. If you remove the possibility you don't have to worry.

I get the impression that people mostly just hope Mozilla will be better than the rest. Casting aspersions on others' motives doesn't help people like me figure out whether this is a big deal or not.

You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.

Even if they meant Monday 26th, that's not a lot of time to have a proper discussion.

Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list.

Is this not exactly what is happening in the bug tracker and the mailing list?

FYI, I work at Mozilla but don't speak for Mozilla.

Going by the bug report for the TRR, I am seeing that the request did not follow all the questions in the request form such as #3. Additionally the bug ticket got a science review but its unclear if that qualify as a "data steward" reviewing it, and there is no Data Review Form as specified by the policy. It is unclear from the ticket in which category of data collection the ticket should be classified under and if the opt-out is correctly applied in this case.

As for the data collection policy itself, I am not seeing a few key questions that as a user I would like to know in order to inspire trust in the project. How long is the data retained? What anonymizing technique if any is applied? Is there a minimum time for discussion so that enough time is given for people to discover the ticket and contribute?

?

Yes! I'm happy to see I'm not the only one to notice this... Chrome has become a new IE.

IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns.

But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser.

My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.

I still use Firefox as my personal browser, but some recent development I have done has been in Chrome. Mostly because Firefox is missing one critical feature for that project. It's not quite in the standard yet. It is Stage 3 with TC39[0].

Stage 3 means, "The solution is complete and no further work is possible without implementation experience, significant usage and external feedback."

So they need browsers to implement it and provide feedback. Chrome has had it since v63. Firefox has had a bug for it for more than a year, but no public progress. Node will have it next month.

I chose to move ahead on it six months ago, figuring Firefox would be on board before I was ready to release. I was wrong. But I'm not going back. Partly for the same reason I stubbornly developed in Firefox during the IE years. This one feature is all that prevents my code from working in Firefox. They will get there eventually. I will not go back to giant build frameworks and bundlers and code splitters and transpilers and gigabytes of tooling. My code works now without those. I look forward to Firefox stepping into this world. I'm eager for that to happen. In the meantime, my users can use Chrome.

0. https://tc39.github.io/proposal-dynamic-import/

Oh, no. That must be prevented. Like, if they made it so gmail and google docs only worked with Chrome, now that practically everybody has moved to gmail.... There would be no defense of such a move.

Care to elaborate on that?

Chrome defaulted top-level event listeners to passive with no real warning or discussion. Chrome no longer passes Acid 3 like it used to. I'm not a web-dev, but I know the list goes on at some length.

So the concern here, whatever its merit, is that Chrome is now undermining other browsers and changing the web for its own benefit.

Wasn’t the famous “Looking Glass” an ad packed as a Shield study and delivered also to Firefox Developer version and even release (not even only Nightly)?

I however don’t expect (and have never expected) Nightly to behave identically as the Release, so I don’t understand that some do expect that, like the OP. The Nightly is your contribution to the development, and obviously its use data aren’t supposed to be “super secret.”

While I do agree that Nightly is to some extend "we need crash reports with a list of all the pornhub tabs you had open", I think in this case they should inform users that they are doing this. The study only lasts a week so people can fallback to normal mozilla if they don't like the potential to be the 50% being "tracked".

I hope Mozilla takes this as an opportunity to A) give the networking team a lecture on how to not word a shield study proposal and B) do something to avoid people thinking all shield studies are bad. They aren't.

Because the option C) is "people should learn not to only read the first message in a proposal discussion and assume this is how they will do it" I find it unlikely that it will be possible, given the modern outrage culture in social media.

Nothing else seems to be working. Some users are against Mozillas forced default tracking/telemetry system and forced install of crust that should really be add-ons (Pocket, sync).

If you have any ideas for ways users can enable change which doesn't inconvenience you then please let them know.

Submit code patches and report bugs.

In short, participate in the Mozilla community.

Mozilla isn't some sort of impenetrable wall of silence, everything they do is open. The initial mailing list thread that start the entire outrage is open. People on it raised these exact concerns. People engaged them. They want to prevent these exact PR disasters.

"Nothing else seems to be working" is simply untrue if you simply look at the bugtracker and mailing list.

I would suggest that you bring "Nothing else seems to be working" to Google and the Chrome dev team. I haven't heard much outcry from that direction yet and they regularly come up with decisions previously undiscussed with the public and then push it through no arguments about it. Mozilla is not like that no matter how much you want to believe it.

For anyone looking on and thinking of following this advice, please don't treat Bugzilla like GitHub, where advocacy and general discussion is the norm. Bugzilla is for code reviews and for people who are otherwise working together so they can coordinate and get things done. It's not an open solicitation for people to jump in and voice their opinions about general project directions, etc. If you do try to use Bugzilla the wrong way, you'll likely be warned about generating too much noise and possibly banned.

Please do continue using social platforms like blogs, comment sites like this one, etc. for posting opinion pieces and weighing in. That's where general commentary belongs, and it'll be much more effective to boot, if you're interested in getting people's attention or changing minds.

That is incorrect. Many bug reports are marked as private for security reasons.

Other decisions such as Pocket, Cliqz and Mr Robot are made and executed in private.

Once the code is thrown over the wall it's all open. Upstream of that is a different matter.

Maybe you don't know how this works. Most (almost all) employees do not have access to these bugs, either. But community members can and do have access.

Early access to these reports can be worth literally millions of dollars in the wrong hands, and cause much more damage to our users. However, who gets access isn't decided by who gets a paycheck. It's decided by who is involved and participating and trustworthy. That can be literally anybody.

For an open source project, Mozilla appears to constantly settle on pretty shitty partners if it is true (as is alleged) that it's these partners that insist on secret communication shielded from any community interaction.

Such shady deals in smoke-filled backrooms are one of the small number of things that are hard to impossible to pull off in a community-driven project without constantly pissing off contributors.

I am amazed that Mozilla has not yet released Pocket as free and open source software. What's going on?

FYI, I work at Mozilla but don't speak for Mozilla.

https://github.com/Pocket